The General Election Campaign is already well underway and on day 2 – or 42 days until the Polls open, the egos are already puffing up in front of the cameras and the lies, myths and general economies with the truth are now in play with full force.
Of course, today is Halloween. The 31st of October 2019. The second date that we had waited months for and upon which the UK was supposed to Leave the EU.
But we haven’t.
And with the next date for Leaving the EU now set as 31st January 2020, the might of the Conservative political machine is being aimed at refuting any suggestion that Boris Johnson had any choice over the question of further delay, and that our current continuing position of what is beginning to feel like being in perpetual abeyance, was, has been and only ever will be the fault of those who want to frustrate Brexit and see the UK Remain.
Yes, in no small part, the ‘Remain Alliance’ does indeed take much of the responsibility for the position that the UK is now in.
But to say that Boris had absolutely no choice and that the decision over the UK Leaving the EU today was taken completely out of his hands is at best a betrayal of the truth and at worst an outright lie.
As we roll on through a process like Brexit, is is easy to overlook that what we are experiencing isn’t just one, but a whole series of different events. All of them interconnected. Any one of them with the potential to rewrite the pathway of everything that follows afterwards, just like the concept of the butterfly effect.
Whilst it seems like long-term history now, the reason that it is disingenuous of Boris and the spin doctors around him to suggest that there was no way to avoid a further Brexit deal, is that when the new Prime Minister took up his new Office in July, he could have chosen to go a very different way.
It is important not to overlook the difficulties and the challenges that Boris inherited from his predecessor Theresa May. Not least of all the hung Parliament constructed of a majority of MPs who have been, still are and after the General Election – if reelected – will be hellbent on Remaining in the EU.
But challenges aside, Boris’ choice was to either do the right thing, or to do all the things that he has done.
The right thing would have been to accept immediately on his appointment as Prime Minister that without a majority in Parliament of Brexit supporting MPs, he was never actually going to get Brexit done.
Yes, reaching out immediately to the Electorate would have been an imposing task for anyone at that point. But with the frustration, despair and downright anger with politicians, what politicians are and have been doing, and the clear absence of any majority in Parliament of MPs who simply want to do all the things that they should, the Electorate would have been a very fertile seed bed for new ideas, new energy, new direction – and above all, taking politics a new way.
By now, not only could Boris have reengaged a disenfranchised Electorate with a very new kind of inclusive and dynamic Manifesto, he could have actually held and won the General Election that any Prime Minister intent on delivering Brexit would have needed – and today we would have left the EU without any kind of binding deal and BREXIT WOULD HAVE BEEN DONE.
Instead, Boris chose to go his own way.
He didn’t look at the political terrain for all that it was and was likely to become.
He didn’t put the People and our Country first.
He chose to go pretty much the same way and create a Brexit in name only deal like May.
He has repeatedly taken what for him appears to be the easiest way.
And so today, on the day the UK should have left the EU, we still no nearer to achieving Brexit.
Adam Tugwell 